ictv episode 4. roots & influences, part 2 (OS)


CW: In the mid-1970s, by which time rock had hit a nadir of excess, self-indulgence and irrelevance, there was a handful of acts in its history - the Velvet Underground, Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5 and the New York Dolls - who were officially regarded with nothing but fear and loathing, but ironically it was these bands that formed the foundations of punk’s whole reinvention of rock. I went and saw Lou Reed when he toured Australia for the first time in 1974, and then again in 1975, and that was pretty momentous, but just as incredible was his airport press conference in Sydney in 1974, in new colour TV…

KIM SALMON (SCIENTISTS): Punk rock was the term that was used and I went out and tried to find this punk rock, and there wasn’t any, so I had to kind of invent it for myself. I had to go find the music that was the roots of it ……and that was hard to find, and that was like Jonathan Richman, New York Dolls and the Stooges, and when I finally got hold of that and all these things are very different from one another as well, it kind of gave me some direction. At the same time in other parts of the country there was I believe the Saints and Radio Birdman, but I wouldn’t have known about them, they may as well have been in China so… they were just as accessible as New York to me.

ROB YOUNGER: It comes down to bands like the New York Dolls, they were the catalyst for me actually getting interested in giving singing a whirl, and... but... we had a love of the Stooges music, and the Stones, and bands like the MC5 and so forth, and we paid those groups a lot of lip-service and name-checked them so often that the sort of Detroit tag kind of stuck and it has done ever since, and it’s probably a bit of a misnomer in that we often played surf music and, you know, Jan & Dean songs, stuff like that, Velvet Underground songs, all sorts of things really...

ROGER GRIERSON: I think it was a reaction against the general tiredness of the music industry, that really god-awful sort of FM California sound. And just some – the whole vacuous, vacuousness, is that a word? The whole vacuousness of the music scene. It was just, you know, it’s a cliché now, but it was the sort of bloated tired old corpse, and oh God, it’s another Jethro Tull record, and you know, Journey and all this other stuff.

DAVID MCCOMB (TRIFFIDS): There were, you know just four to six of us into punk rock, although we were into punk rock in the widest sense, and, you know, the rest of the class was strictly into literally your Eagles and that sort of thing.  Good time rock’n’roll. Perth was a very blues orientated city. There’d been a big blues tradition there. And it was not exactly Chicago blues or Delta blues but more good time rock’n’roll blues, twelve-bar so you could dance to it, and so we really had quite a hatred of that sort of good-timey blues which took a while to shake off. I don’t mind it now but it was really, you know, it drove us in the opposite direction to like people like Kraftwork and you know, anyone that was weird and anything weird that spun out of the outer fringes of punk rock like the group Pere Ubu from Cleveland, Ohio. Things like that and obviously the New York punk rock groups like Television, Talking Heads.  That was the direction we were pushed towards.

CW: Then somehow Molly Meldrum put Blondie on Countdown and lo and behold “In the Flesh” was a hit in Australia before the band hit anywhere else in the world. And so they came out here to tour as early as 1977 and that tour was really galvanising for the local scene. The band’s no-show in Brisbane, which I went to, prompted “Wild Rock Riots.” The band went and told Molly about this great young local band they’d seen in Melbourne called the Boys Next Door but Molly didn’t want to know.

KEN WEST (PROMOTER/BIG DAY OUT): I think it was just a group of people that didn’t quite fit.  I also think it was coming from, art critics may strike me down dead for it, but as soon as I got in to art school I realised, mid-70’s, that art wasn’t really it. That the idea of doing paintings and sculptures and putting them in a gallery seemed to suck, so you go, where is the creative outlet? and the creative outlet led in most cases to music.